A bloody Buddhist samurai pic set in the 19th
century of
Japan. It's
adapted from a 1913 novel by Kaizan Nakazato and is
written by Shinobu
Hoashimoto. Under the lively direction of Kihachi
Okamoto ("Red
Lion"/"Zatoichi
vs. Yojimbo"/"Fort Graveyard") the brooding tale with
the message 'to
live
by the sword, is to die by the sword,' is given a
sweeping epic
treatment,
shows great swords play, is well-acted and is
beautifully photographed
in widescreen 'Scope and in stunning
black-and-white.

In 1862, Ryunosuke Tsukue (Tatsuya Nakadai), a sword
master
with
his own peculiar style who was given the boot by the
Kogen school for
his
bloodthirsty ways, acts like a psychopath and
needlessly slays a
harmless
old pilgrim (Kamatari Fujiwara) praying by a Buddhist
shrine atop a
mountain
pass to no longer be a burden on his young
granddaughter. His surviving
granddaughter, Omatsu (Yôko Naito), is raised by
her so-called
uncle
Shichibei (Ko Nishimura), a crooked peddler who
happened to be passing
by the shrine at the time of the murder and felt sorry
for the
beautiful
Omatsu. Shichibei thinks by doing this good deed he
can find redemption
for his petty criminal life.

Ryunosuke then beds down with Ohama (Michiyo
Aratama), the
distressed
wife of an upcoming tournament opponent on Mt. Mitake
from the same
school
he once attended, Bunnojo Utsuki (Ichiro Nakaya), who
has little chance
of beating the master swordsman and is the reason she
did what she did
so that Ryunosuke would take a dive. When the
honorable Bunnojo hears
about
this deception, he divorces his wife and during the
sporting match
lunges
and tries to kill Ryunosuke. Instead he's killed and
later thirty of
his
followers who try to ambush Ryunosuke in the woods are
slain by the
proficient
killing-machine. Ryunosuke agrees to take care of
Ohama and they have a
child. In the meantime, he's a disgraced samurai who
joins an upstart
rowdy
outlaw cutthroat group, whose group leader is Serizawa
(Kei Sato), and
they aim to take down the powerful Lord Kondo and
cause anarchy in the
land by paving the way for the collapse of the
Shogunate rule.

The brother, Hyoma Utsuki (Yuzo Kayama), of the
slain
Bunnojo vows
for revenge and joins the school of Japan's best
swordsman, Shimada
(Toshiro
Mifune), who teaches that "The soul is the sword." and
"An evil sword
is
an evil soul." The callow brother prepares for the day
he will be ready
to face Ryunosuke. That comes about some two years
later, whereby the
strange
climax has the demonic and haunted swordsman taking on
ghosts and both
sides of the fray. Ryunosuke goes down after killing
his selfish
common-law
wife, his innocent child and scores of other swordsmen
in a chilling
climactic
scene of massive carnage.

The film, though well-constructed, has big gaps in
its
storytelling,
leaving it incomprehensible. It seems this was meant
to be an ongoing
serial
with many chapters, but when it materialized as just
this film those
chapters
were condensed and we're left hanging with missing
parts to the
story.